eSchemes 1.50 is released

2009-03-01 15:47:54 -- Eugene Gorbunoff [ecomstation.ru]

eCo Software continues to fulfil the agreements, new version of eSchemes is released via BETAZONE (the sub-system is aimed to change the external view of desktop: colors, buttons,..).

• restored compatibility with some applications
• improved installation procedure
• working on new schemes

eSchemes homepage

Other extenders of eCo Software

You can support the developers of WPS applications and send sponsor money to equip the developers with SMP computers.

Software updates from Paul Smedley

2009-02-24 03:00:31 -- Eugene Gorbunoff [ecomstation.ru]

Over the last couple of days, I've updated a few ports at http://os2ports.smedley.info

# 2009-02-24 - Gnash v0.8.4 port added

Gnash is a GNU Flash movie player. Flash is an animation file format pioneered by Macromedia which continues to be supported by their successor company, Adobe. Flash has been extended to include audio and video content, and programs written in ActionScript, an ECMAScript-compatible language. Gnash is based on GameSWF, and supports most SWF v7 features and some SWF v8 and v9.

# 2009-02-23 - ffmpeg updated using lastest SVN code

FFmpeg is a complete, cross-platform solution to convert and stream audio and video. It includes libavcodec - the leading audio/video codec library.

# 2009-02-23 - PHP5 v5.2.8 build updated

PHP is a widely-used general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for Web development and can be embedded into HTML.

# 2009-02-23 - Apache2 v2.2.11 build updated

The Apache HTTP Server Project is an effort to develop and maintain an open-source HTTP server for modern operating systems including UNIX and Windows NT. The goal of this project is to provide a secure, efficient and extensible server that provides HTTP services in sync with the current HTTP standards.

# 2009-02-23 - Squid updated to 3.0.stable13

Squid is a caching proxy for the Web supporting HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, and more. It reduces bandwidth and improves response times by caching and reusing frequently-requested web pages. Squid has extensive access controls and makes a great server accelerator. It runs on most available operating systems, including Windows and is licensed under the GNU GPL.

# 2009-02-23 - OpenTTD updated to v0.6.3

OpenTTD is an open source clone of the Microprose game "Transport Tycoon Deluxe", a popular game originally written by Chris Sawyer. It attempts to mimic the original game as closely as possible while extending it with new features.

If you like this software and want to support continued ports, please consider donating via PayPal via the link at http://smedley.info/os2ports, or via the Mensys online store at http://www.mensys.net/os2ports

Installation of b2evolution

2009-02-22 16:13:52 -- Eugene Gorbunoff [ecomstation.ru]

You can read how to install b2evolution: b2evolution 2.4.5 Monument Valley hosted on OS/2 Warp 4 Merlin

b2evolution - is a powerful blog tool you can install on your own website.

More interviews from the past

2009-02-21 21:41:10 -- Eugene Gorbunoff [ecomstation.ru]

The homepage of the Community is updated

We have found old interviews:

• Robert Henschel
• Jan van Wijk
• Samuel Audet

Wait for new interviews!

IRC-channels: #ecolabs is related to eComStation and OS/2 only

eComStation on communicator

2009-02-21 21:35:52 -- Eugene Gorbunoff [os2world.com]

eComStation is working on mobile phone?

Read more on the site of user: cyber, source of pictures

eCo Labs - more and more tasks

2009-02-21 21:21:28 -- Eugene Gorbunoff [ecomstation.ru]

eCo Labs is a fund to attract new developers to eComStation. We are trying to share the income with standalone developers; stimulate the development of new PM-controls and libraries. Moreover, we are going update the portal for developers and enrich it with links and libraries.

To improve quality of eCo Software products, to accumulate templates for new software we published more than 60 tasks.

P.S. eCo Labs is able to work with the developers living in Russia and Ukraine only.

Warpstock 2009 announcement

2009-02-21 03:47:46 -- Eugene Gorbunoff [warpstock.org]

The Board of Directors of Warpstock Corporation is pleased to announce that Warpstock 2009 will be held Friday through Sunday noon, August 7th - 9th, at the University of New Mexico campus in Albuquerque, New Mexico. We hope to have cost details shortly and open Warpstock 2009 for registration.

Warpstock Corporation is a Virginia corporation. The Warpstock annual conference is a gathering of OS/2 users, developers, and vendors from around the world for the purpose of education and advocacy. More information is available at the Warpstock web site

Full list of conferences

ACPI - check your ticket

2009-02-17 23:03:31 -- Eugene Gorbunoff [ecomstation.ru]

The development of ACPI sub-system continues, it's time to change the development approach (prevent degradation of code, change debug approach, etc)

Homepage of ACPI for eComStation

Please check your ticket in the tracker:

• Active tickets
• All tickets, inclusing closed

(visit the tracker periodically during 1-2 weeks) Post the reply and attach the logs. (register to access the tracker)

Some questions for users:

• Do you want to monitor temperature of CPU? The widget doesn't show proper values.. then try to google, find something like (path in ACPI tree): \\_SB_.PCI0.SBRG.SIOR.HWT1

  google -> model of your motherboard + temperature + SBRG or HWT + TEMP or TMP

• Do you feel problems with NVidia chipset in /SMP /APIC and /!NOD switch? What are the problems?
• VPIC.SYS testing. Join the testing if the computer works in PIC mode and doesn't in APIC

  If you have a custom PCI device (DOS drivers only) then prepare Null-modem cable.

  If you have simple Core Duo and have troubles with APIC then contact us.

• Please confirm that Suspend/resume works on 1 CPU, Videodriver should be: Panorama VESA
• Owners of Acer notebooks: if Wifi adapter is not visible for the system then use PCIWRITE
• Users with AMD chipset, please try something like this: /SMP /APIC /!NOD /SAP:0x10
• Do throttling and set of power state work for you? Try W4 kernel if no success with SMP kernel.
• If the boot is slow , if boot stops at KBDBASE then notify us what is the model of your PC. (SMP APIC mode)
• If PC hangs when you start ACPIDaemon then inform us.

Prices Reduced for Blonde Guy computers

2009-02-07 17:11:06 -- Eugene Gorbunoff [OS2VOICE.org, Neil Waldhauer]

Thanks to increasing demand, Blonde Guy has reduced prices on IBM Thinkpads and new desktop computers with eComStation and OpenOffice preloaded.

The $1199 notebook computer is an IBM Thinkpad T43 Model with a high resolution screen (1400 x 1050), wireless Internet (WiFi) and a DVD Multi-Burner.

The $1399 desktop computer has a handsome small form-factor case, a removable SATA-2 disk drive for efficient backups, USB ports on the front panel, and a SATA DVD-RW drive.

All computers are configured with eComStation 2.0 RC6a, OpenOffice.org 2.40, Firefox 3.0 and Suntan Special. Prices include eCS license and OpenOffice support.

Blonde Guy computers

Neil Waldhauer homepage - Expert consulting for OS/2 Warp and eComStation

btw, Blonde Guy offers Suntan special package of utils and applications

February mix of eComStation news

2009-02-05 17:50:26 -- Eugene Gorbunoff [ecomstation.ru]

We have collected some news related to eComStation

1. Comic Market, seems that japanese OS/2 fans draw dodziki comics about OS/2 and sell on Comic Market.

2. http://os2ecs.org site is alive again

3. BMT Micro, Mensys Here is the BMT Micro, Mensys shop

4. Russian users send sponsor money to Paul Smedley again, it's ubnormal, better support local developers :)

5. Tuscany regional administration (Italy) is sending to all its public libraries an electronic edition of Prison Notebooks by Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937 well known thinker about history, politics, philosophy and humanities). source

6. The funds are searching for sip-library, which may be ported to eComStation

7. eCo Shop catalogue improted some popular products to its catalogue

• Desktop on-call
• Super Virtual Disk
• IBM ALP2
• CoolFM
• SearchPlus

Perfect eComStation

2009-02-03 14:20:32 -- Eugene Gorbunoff [ecomstation.ru]

eComStation 2.0 is under construction, you can feel the power of new version today if install a release-candidate.

Which features to implement in eComStation 2.1? Share your ideas:

• Perfect eComStation (users need recovery means, fast boot, installer improvements, support of hardware, better USB support, better multimedia, system files protection, etc)
• I need new applications (users need internet phones, editors, catalogues, ODBC, vocabularies, etc)

Users need more software:

• OS2 World.Com Bounties
• The Warp Wishlist
• eCo Labs tasks

La-la-la: eCo Tunes, mmioCast

2009-01-23 22:34:35 -- Eugene Gorbunoff [ecomstation.ru]

eCo Software is going to participate in eComStation multimedia development, Welcome to La-la-la site

ntim (Kosarev Timofey) have created some I/O procedures and players already:

• eCo Tunes -- eCo Tunes Internet radio (pipe-version supported by Central Remote Control)
• mmioCast IO Proc -- Internet radio integrated to WPS
• Monkey's audio -- compressed lossles audio format

eComStation PC is usually used as office computer, the sound in the background keeps positive mood, doesn't influence on working atmosphere. The sound support should be improved in eComStation, let's create more players, codecs and audio applications.

eCo Labs - more and more tasks

2009-01-18 16:16:16 -- Eugene Gorbunoff [ecomstation.ru]

eCo Labs is a fund to attract new developers to eComStation. We are trying to share the income with standalone developers; stimulate the development of new PM-controls and libraries. Moreover, we are going update the portal for developers and enrich it with links and libraries.

To improve quality of eCo Software products, to accumulate templates for new software we published more than 50 tasks.

P.S. eCo Labs is able to work with the developers living in Russia and Ukraine only.

OpenOffice.org 3.1.0 beta 1 available

2009-01-16 23:02:46 -- Eugene Gorbunoff [ecomstation.com, Joachim Benjamins]

Serenity Systems International and Mensys BV are pleased to announce the first public beta of OpenOffice.org 3.1 for eComStation and OS/2.

It is available to anyone with an active OpenOffice.org Support Agreement for eComStation and OS/2, via their download-area at the Mensys Online Shop

This release is a developer build based on the current DEV300 m38 milestone trunk.

Features

• Support for Microsoft Office Open XML (OOXML/DOCX) file format.
• Support for XWP/eWPS sliding menu hilite (requires XWorkPlace 1.0.8 or eCS 2.0 RC4)
• Support for clipboard bitmap formats and unicode text.
• Support for mouse wheel.
• Support for WPS integration via seperate package (OOoWPS102.WPI)
• Support for the FreeType2 (FT2) font engine for improved text rendering.

Morevoer,

• QUICKSTART: quickstart has been implemented for eComStation and OS/2; when enabled in OOo option dialogs, a shadow of your quickstart WPS icon object will be created in the startup folder.
• NLS: This beta version is only released in the English language.
• EMAIL: e-mail related settings are now supported, you can email your current document, but only ThunderBird is supported. To enable this feature, the Internet Application Integration tool must be installed and configured for your email client. In OOo options, Internet settings, set email program field to 'thunderbird'; full path for executable and directories will be taken from your INI files (IAI settings).
• WEB: the default OS/2 browser will be used for opening web pages. To enable this feature, the Internet Application Integration tool must be installed and configured for your browser.

More information on the official OpenOffice.org development roadmap can be found here

Installation Requirements

• WarpIn 1.0.18
• UniClip
• LibC 0.6.3
• Innotek Font Engine
• this installation will not overwrite existing installations, you can use it alongside OpenOffice.org 1.1.5 and OpenOffice.org 2.x
• installation should preferably be done on a JFS volume, as it may run slow otherwise. The installation target volume must support long filenames.
• installation takes around 400 MB of drivespace.

Optional Requirements

For better rendering of the GUI font, it is suggested to install Workplace Sans TrueType font. You can download the Workplace Sans font from the following website: http://users.socis.ca/~ataylo00/creative/fonts/index.html

WPS integration package for OpenOffice.org 3.1 for eComStation and OS/2:

• Extends the WPS data file class to recognize OpenOffice.org document files
• Integrated support for WPS-Wizard hint and folder info area
• REXX hooks for reading document properties
• When documents are saved, the proper Extended Attribute Type is added to the file, this allows recognizing OOo documents even if the extension is not added.

If you are updating from an earlier release, the WPS integration is already enabled and working; if WPS integration was enabled for beta releases, you need to install the OOoWPS102.WPI package (if not already installed) and run ?:OpenOffice.org.3.1.0.Betaprogramooodoc.cmd This script will activate the WPS integration for this release of OpenOffice.org 3.1 and remove it from other beta releases.

Support

Support specific to the eComStation and OS/2 version can be obtained through the ticketing system

A newsgroup is available for community support here or here

Enjoy!

Best regards,

Serenity Systems International

NeoWPS: eSchemes should be updated

2009-01-15 22:21:36 -- Eugene Gorbunoff [ecomstation.ru]

eSchemes is updated (screenshots, to download login to BETAZONE)

New version 1.49 is released. Installation is improved. There are some bugs (temporary bugs: editor doesn't open, doesn't work; some schemes can't be used)

Moreover,

• David Graser created TWENTY new schemes for eSchemes
• We are going collect wallpapers (in the bottom of Download page)

This applications are not ready for eSchemes. Please help to the developers improve their applications.

Installing eCS on discs +512 GB and next to Vista

2009-01-09 20:20:46 -- Eugene Gorbunoff [Mensys, Roderick Klein, http://www.os2world.com/component/option,com_smf/Itemid,63/topic,1406.msg9873/topicseen,1/#new]

Some work that makes eComStation possible is done by volunteers. Other things are possible because people and companies buy licenses of eComstation, software subscription etc. Thats how I (Roderick) and other people can work on eComStation.

Some of this research has been done in the last 2 weeks. We need your feedback in the eComStation bug tracker to see if it works. To access the bugtracker you need to login www.ecomstation.com and then goto the bugtracker. This stuff is not for the faint harted. If you don't know what your doing and get confused from reading these bugs then don't work on it :-) Hopefully these two items WILL be fixed in eComstation RC 7 so it will be just a matter of clicking some buttons!

Point 1: Some people who have been experimenting with eComStation and hard discs bigger then 512 GB have found some problems. Basicly if you wipe the LVM information AND the first sector of the hard disc with DFSEE and create all partitions on the drive with eCS. You can dual boot Windows XP and eCS. Even boot eCS from a drive bigger then 512 GB.

See eComStation bugnumber 2345 for details. Hopefully we can come up with a solution to make it work without having to wipe the hard discs. This is still in the research stages. But it has something to do with the CHS values.

Point 2 People installing eCS next to Vista may have found that you get a Vista winload.exe error. The solution is that you need to use DFSEE to collect the "NT disk signature" value. Do the install and THEN install the boot manager and eCS. Go BACK into dfsee and put back the "NT disk signature" value. This should fix the winload.exe error message. And you should be able to boot Vista via the eCS boot manager. Details can be found in bug 2354.

More feedback on your experience with Vista and eCS is also needed when it comes to drive layout. Read bug report 2355 for this.

Again the bugtraker is NOT intended to ask support questions if you don't understand something. I need people to provide feedback if it works yes or no.

Thanks for your feedback,